Born in 1928, Stanley Kubrick was raised in the Bronx, the son of a respectable and successful GP, Dr Jacques Kubrick, and his wife, Gertrude. There was no manifest reason for young Stanley to regard himself an outsider; it was scarcely unusual to be a Jew in his neighbourhood, but he once told me - kidding, of course - "I'm not Jewish; I just had two Jewish parents." A loner from early on, irregular in attendance, and performance, at school, he didn't mix with the local gang and was, said one of them, "always a mystery". Unlike the no less mysterious (and secretive) artist Balthus, Stanley did not "escape" a defining identity by fabricating a non-Jewish lineage; he set out instead to transcend banal circumstance by making a name for himself as the highest possible form of invisible man: first photographer, then film director.

His only regular interplay with others, before he became a cinematic maestro, was as drummer in a high school jazz band. He also played a very good game of chess - the beauty of which lies in the elegant annihilation of a rival who is, in a way, your mirror image. By the time he was 17, he was already leading a double life, as high school student and as a professional photographer, selling pictures stamped: Stan Kubrick - Photo.

It was as if a pane of glass had always divided him from the common world. Once it was a lens, Kubrick could define himself by what he did rather than what he was: he became less man than bipod camera, somewhat like Andy Warhol, who wished he was a machine.

This new volume, Stanley Kubrick, Drama and Shadows: Photographs 1945-1950, reveals a command of camera angles which it is tempting to call "instinctive", but is more likely to have been planned as consciously as chess moves. The photographs show an appetite for the dark side: the derelict (bums and commuting no-hopers), the deprived (often black), the doomed (gamblers and wannabe showgirls) and the primitive. The only non-American dossier is of life in the Portuguese fishing village of Nazare. The camera suggests confident familiarity with local life, which the monoglot down-there-on-assignment Kubrick can never have had.

Unlike Walker Evans - whose agitprop series of depression photographs, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, came with an eloquent commentary by the journalist and critic James Agee - Kubrick's interest in the underside of life calls for no political scheme. Without an Agee, the viewer must supply his or her own commentary. Kubrick takes no responsibility for whether you shrug or act.

His aesthetic stance seems often to be "passive-aggressive". Prowling 1940s New York, the Bronx kid was a secret sniper: Steppenwolf as shutter-bug, skinning his victims without their feeling a thing. The street photographer is a hit man who shoots people silently and without leaving a wound, a soft, invisible assassin who draws no blood. The telescopic sight used by actual snipers points up the ambiguity of the term "shooting".

The street photographer employs systematic slyness in his armed voyeurism. He catches his victims off guard and often prints what would least flatter them if they knew about it. Anyone who has watched a movie star selecting the "right" shot from a sheet of contact prints knows that the frames that he or she crosses out, to embargo their publicity use, are likely to be the ones that are, in the photographer's view, the truest.

A studio photographer will often take shot after shot until the subject is too exhausted to keep up a veil of charm. Only then does his or her real face appear. This may account, in part, for Stanley's notorious method of asking actors to do a movie scene over and over again. Asked what was wrong with the previous take, he would say: "Nothing. It was fine. Would you do it again?"

Kubrick never got into fights, except in the sense of going regularly to boxing matches. The sequences of images of Walter Cartier and Rocky Graziano (who had three epic, notoriously savage middleweight championship bouts with Tony Zale) dwell with an almost erotic fascination on the gladiatorial nakedness of the fighters.

There is continuity here with the mature Kubrick's cinematic oeuvre, which harps on varieties of violence and death. His first short film was a boxing documentary; his first feature, Killer Kiss, had a boxer anti-hero. As the man behind the trigger/camera, Kubrick mastered his fear of death by being its shadowy accomplice. "Dr Strangelove, c'est moi" is the secret motto in his cracker.

Never an ambulance-chaser or a crime-scene specialist like the great Weegee (New York City's hotshot of the Yellow Press), young Kubrick was not content to catch life on the fly. Like a spy with his vocational duplicity, he sometimes concealed his cumbrous camera in a paper bag with a hole in it, in order to snap people - for instance, in a series taken in the subway - without even looking at them. Cop and robber, his camera arrests the fugitive moment and captures it by literally split-second timing.

If Kubrick often honoured the ethos of the on-the-spot observer, he also cheated; one of the earliest prints is of a newsvendor, in his kiosk, framed by April 1945 newspapers announcing the death of FDR. The very image of America's bereavement, the guy appears ineffably sad. It looks as "natural" as a picture-desk editor would require, but in fact the vendor was coached to adopt his sorry expression. What looks to have been caught on the fly is a set-up.

Kubrick might defend his fabricated image by maintaining that, as Michel Pic puts it: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer." Maybe; but suppose that the kiosk-owner had been observed over a longer period, as the punters are in the Aqueduct racetrack sequence. Might Kubrick not have found mordant, and truer, irony in the man's changes of expression, perhaps ending with a smile, as the day went on?

Today's cameras rarely fail to lie. The images, moving and still, to be seen in newspapers and on TV are increasingly procured by the photographer. The mere knowledge of his presence brings out the gunmen, the stone-throwers and the fascistic police. The rigging of reality has a market young Kubrick could never have dreamed of, but might have relished. All the world's a photo opportunity.

Stanley not only rigged set-ups; he also cropped his pics to make them more dramatic. His pleasure was the systematic defeat of commonplace expectations, whether it was in the ironic ending of The Killing or in the refusal to reprieve the audience, or the cowardly officer in charge of the firing squad, from witnessing the shooting of the three "crucified" soldiers in Paths of Glory. (He was, however, willing to change it to improve the picture's chances at the box office.) The disjunctive form of Full Metal Jacket challenged narrative unity and required audiences to perceive the link between the two halves of the film.

Provocation was his regular game: Dr Strangelove outraged the Pentagon (though it was unofficially recognised to be a near-documentary) and A Clockwork Orange gloated over the humiliation of the droogs' victims. When he dwells at length on suffering and humiliation (as also in Full Metal Jacket), it begins to smack of complicity. The old "joke" is of one photographer showing another a picture of the horrible deformities of a beggar in India who held out his fingerless hand for alms. "What did you give him?" "F2 at two hundredths of a second."

This handsomely produced cull is from the thousands of pictures young Kubrick shot, mostly when working for Look magazine. They are introduced, with the usual fanfares, by Rainer Crone, who sets the pretentious tone by using "seminal" twice in the first two pages. The omens are not improved by a top dressing of critical cant from one Hubertus von Amelunxen, who sounds like a character invented specifically for Kubrick by Terry Southern, and offers such insights as: "Kubrick's photographs construct the gaze in decay ... [his] photo essays excel by presenting continuously in the gaze into the space or by spatializing the gaze as it were, in contributing to them photographic vectors of imaginary or real viewpoint."

Yes, that's what it says. Does it help? A parade of pundits - including, of course, Susan Sontag and Siegfried Kracauer - is there to alert us to photography's "hermeneutic ambiguity". Their verbiage sustains a superfluous metaphysical apparatus. Qualities and intentions ("ethical", even) are attached to an essentially opportunistic medium "democratic" enough to encourage everyone who can afford a camera to think himself "creative". Like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, who discovers that he has spoken prose all his life without knowing it, the snapper can be flattered to learn that he is more hermeneutic than he ever guessed.

This is not to deny that Gary Winogrand or Diane Arbus or Lee Friedlander (in his recent superb retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) qualifies as an artist, but how much do theories of "redemption of the past" or analogies with Brechtian Gestus enhance our appreciation of photography? Be that as it may, Crone's academic vocabulary doesn't prevent him making illuminating points - for instance, that a still image can also tell a moving story. Take Kubrick's still of a young woman, back to camera, holding a lipstick with which she has written "I HATE LOVE" on a white fence. If captured on the wing, would it be more of a "true" photograph than if, as turns out to be the case, it was wilfully posed by young Stanley? In fact, it is the reduction of cinema to a single frame: an unmoving movie, which primes and frustrates the viewer's wish to know more, and so leads us to read the girl's despair into a moving narrative.

Kubrick's stills career ended when he broke into feature movies (largely funded, as Paul Mazursky records, by his insolent extraction of funds from his Californian uncle), but there is aesthetic continuity between his organisation of both still and moving images. It's made very clear in the long scene, in his masterpiece Barry Lyndon, where the two highwaymen lounge outside an inn while they quiz and are quizzed by the mounted Barry (Ryan O'Neal). The steady attention paid to them promises that they will be instrumental in his coming off his high horse.

Chris Marker's La Jetée is the only film I know to be composed entirely of stills (apart from one clip where a woman is waking from sleep), but the technique draws so much attention to itself that it seems more like a dare than an experiment. On the other hand, Andrzej Munk's The Passenger makes intriguing, unplanned use of stills. Because of the death of the director, stills and moving images of the story - about a concentration camp guard and a surviving victim on a post-war Baltic cruise - had to be cut together. The stills (of pre-planned but unshot scenes) were incorporated only to fill the lacunae caused by Munk's death. The effect is to enhance the ambiguity of the scenario, since we can never know how these frozen frames were to be amplified, or even in what exact order they were conceived. As a result, the audience has to stir its imagination in order to read meaning into cryptic images.

When I mentioned The Passenger to him, Stanley had never heard of it, but his movies, read in conjunction with this valuable volume, carry an implicit recognition of affinities between his early work in stills and the unhurried progression of his mature genius. What innovatory ambiguities and unnerving asymmetry might he have created, had he developed the - as Kracauer would say - Hegelian dialectic between the two usually distinct modes of photography, in both of which he was a master?